Guest buaseng Posted February 1, 2007 Posted February 1, 2007 Engineer suspects airport cover-up An expert engineer yesterday voiced suspicion that people in the last Thaksin Shinawatra government covered (up)over cracks in the runways at Suvarnabhumi airport. Tortrakul Yomnak, a member of Airports of Thailand (AoT), said like other engineers, he used to believe that cracks at the new airport were ''technical cracks'', which are not unusual during construction. Mr Tortrakul also inspected the airport in 2005 after the Bangkok Post ran stories about cracks in the runways. ''I'd never thought there were real cracks on the runway until recently when I went back to inspect the airport, and I remembered that the runway looked so new, and that aroused my suspicion about whether there were cover-ups,'' he said at a forum at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand last night. He conceded he did not take any action during his 2005 inspection even though it looked suspicious, saying nobody would dare to speak up against the airport when Mr Thaksin was in power. This was because Mr Thaksin had projected the airport as ''the pride of the nation'' and intimidated anyone who cast doubts on it. ''I feel I was used as a tool to clear the past government,'' he said. Mr Tortrakul said more inspections would be made to see if the cracks were due to ''systematic failure'' _ an engineering term referring to a very serious structural problem, mostly occurring when substandard soil is used in landfill _ or whether the cracks are on the surface. If the former is the case, it will take at least three years and a huge budget to repair the structure, he said. Mr Tortrakul proposed two options _ either repair the cracks or dismantle the runways and rebuild them. He said repairing the cracks may require special techniques which would cost more than a reconstruction. Questions may be raised over whether the cracked runways were worth repairing when compared to the costs for dismantling and rebuilding them, he said. More: http://www.bangkokpost.net/News/01Feb2007_news08.php Quote
